My 16-year old son Lewis is going to be an assistant counselor at a sleep away camp in New Hampshire. It’s a paid position, one that I feel like we’re owed. After all, Lewis has spent two weeks every summer for the past eight years at this camp and I have spent thousands of dollars to finance it. I’m not even going to factor in the cost of the lost beach towels, the $50 sweatshirts that they sell in the camp shop that come in two weeks too moldy to salvage, the forgotten sleeping bag and the gone-missing digital camera that he begged to take with him last summer.

So, for the camp, the $1,000 bucks that they will shell out for Lewis to sleep in a cabin with 12 nine-year old boys, peel carrots in the mess hall kitchen and teach sailing is a bargain. Counting the overnight duty, I think that for the eight weeks of camp it works out to something like 75¢ an hour. If you subtract the cost of the stuff we had to buy to outfit him for camp – t-shirts, shorts, bathing suit, sneakers, sunscreen, bug spray as well as the new beach towels, sleeping bag and a replacement camera, it maybe that he’s working for free. But he’s not complaining. Neither am I.